New Old News: Bruce Dern On Working With Hitchcock, Hal Ashby

Earlier this week, Richard Dreyfuss and Bruce Dern spoke to journalists at a press day in Los Angeles about their new film The Lightkeepers, which was helmed by writer-director Daniel Adams. During his discussion of Adams approach, Dern offered a few reflections about his work with directors Hal Ashby and Alfred Hitchcock, both of whom he collaborated with in the 1970s. Comparing their imagination to Adams, Dern remembered his experiences on the films Coming Home and Family Plot, and offered the following anecdotes.

Describing the way in which Adams evoked his illustrious predecessors on The Lightkeepers, Dern said, "It's definitely a return toward Hal Ashby, with an emphasis on a hundred years earlier. I mean, I would have loved to see Hal tackle 1905 – I don't care where it is. Because he just had a magical look at things; he looked at things totally differently." Switching gears to offer memories of an experience he shared with Hitchcock, he observed, "his imagination runs wild. People forget that me made silent movies, 25 of them, before he ever came here, and he looked at things funny."